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Sorry. Sorry to you Specer as well. Can anybody undo his CW?
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Jonathan SampsonJul 17 '09 at 21:21

Bah. Now I can't turn it off... oh well. No one was upvoting it anyway.
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Spencer RuportJul 17 '09 at 21:24

@ColeJohnson the Many Memes of Meta is actually a valuable resource as there are a lot of inside jokes that are easier to point to that question for answers than explaining over and over again. But I won't argue on the others as they don't have the same value.
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psubsee2003Mar 27 '13 at 15:22

You mean how i met SO ? Sure, when my code failed and i could not figure out why - public static void mian(Strings[]arg){System.out.println("Goodbye cruel world");}
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TimeMar 31 '13 at 11:32

I believe it was GirlDeveloper's blog (aka Sara Chipps) that first put me onto it, although I didn't join until it came out of private beta. Thanks to that blog post I'd heard of it, and Douglas Leeder (a close friend) probably mentioned it too.

I started writing a blog post about the possibility of getting addicted to SO on the evening of the day I joined (September 26th 2008) although the actual post didn't go out until the Sunday evening.

@Jon Skeet and that's when you left microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp
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SashaJul 18 '09 at 13:40

1

@Sasha: Very soon after, yes. For a while I tried to do both, but I don't have the time and I was forever wishing I had WMD when writing newsgroup posts. I do miss detailed discussions though...
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Jon SkeetJul 18 '09 at 19:41

I believe I found it by searching a question on Google. A Stack Overflow question was the first result. I pretty much just joined to get rid of that annoying "First time here? Check out the FAQ" thing that kept popping up. I never believed I would get more than 100 rep, let alone 7,000.

Same here. I notices I keep finding SO on google. At first I thought it was a blog, but it didn't seem quite right (something like "this Stack Overflow guy is good"). When I read the FAQ I imminently wanted to join - it just seemed awesome.
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KobiJun 29 '10 at 16:03

I think Stack Overflow gradually entered my consciousness. It would come up fairly often when googling programming questions, and I think one day, it just sort of hit me that there was something special about Stack Overflow.

It was probably the aesthetics I noticed first--the site has a really clean, inviting look, and code blocks are formatted just how you'd like them to be. So, I bookmarked it and started going there first when I needed help. Soon after that, I started to notice the reputation score and badges. I had seen reputation ratings on other sites, but it seemed to stand out more on Stack Overflow. I could see the power of it. It's like a competition to see who can be the most cooperative. It was then that I joined.

I think it was through some arbitrary blog post saying "Stack Overflow out of private beta" or something along those lines. I had never heard of it before, so I decided to check it out. It did not disappoint.

I googled some Java question or another and a Stack Overflow post was the most useful result. That single experience wasn't enough to hook me, but the top Google result for the very next question I had was also a Stack Overflow post. So I took a closer look, signed up, and started answering questions...

I don't remember the exact timeline, but Scott Hanselman mentioned it either on Hanselminutes or in his blog. This would have been approximately when Preview 5 was out, and I had just started an ASP.NET MVC project so was mainly interested from that perspective. ("Hey, here's a really cool site that is built in ASP.NET MVC!")

Wow, I've been here for 6 months already!? Well, according to my account, Jan. 13 was the day of my first question. Correlating that to my Google History, on Jan 13 I was looking up a friend by his screenname. It rendered a stackoverflow account - I viewed it, and two other search results. Signed up thereafter.

I can't remember, I joined a while ago. I can remember being a big fan of it almost right away though. The clear interface, and the quality and speed of the answers impressed me! When you're used to asking on a forum and then coming back a day later to someone who has a equal misunderstanding of the issue then Stack Overflow was light years ahead.

Someone linked to the programmer joke 'question' that was closed/deleted some time ago on a gaming forum. For a while, I had thought of SO as a sort of joke forum for programmers. Having forgot the name of the site but distinctively remembering the design of the site, I managed to find it again several months later when I signed up as I was getting into web design.

Since then, I discovered the SE network and have participated in many sites (with varying degrees of activity).

However, my repeated feelings of "eww... Experts-Exchange" were much stronger, and I quickly conceded since that this was likely to become the primary programming resource, I wouldn't be avoiding it forever and may as well get on board as soon as possible.

I was searching for answers to simple programming questions, and 9 times out of 10, the first link (and most helpful) was to Stack Overflow. I used these for a while, and then I had a few questions that I wanted to ask, so I made an account.